Trust Your Compatriots, but Count Your Change: The Roles of Trust, Mistrust and Distrust in Democracy

Although trust is clearly central to human relations of all kinds, it is less clear whether there is a role for trust in democratic politics. In this article, I argue that trust is central to democratic institutions as well as to democratic political participation, and that arguments which make distrust the central element of democracy fail. First, I argue for the centrality of trust to the democratic process. The voluntary compliance that is central to democracies relies on trust, along two dimensions: citizens must trust their legislators to have the national interest in mind and citizens must trust each other to abide by democratically established laws. Second, I refute arguments that place distrust at the centre of democratic institutions. I argue, instead, that citizens must be vigilant with respect to their legislators and fellow citizens; that is, they must be willing to ensure that the institutions are working fairly and that people continue to abide by shared regulations. This vigilance – which is reflected both in a set of institutions as well as an active citizenry – is motivated by an attitude termed 'mistrust'. Mistrust is a cautious attitude that propels citizens to maintain a watchful eye on the political and social happenings within their communities. Moreover, mistrust depends on trust: we trust fellow citizens to monitor for abuses of our own rights and privileges just as we monitor for abuses of their rights and privileges. Finally, I argue that distrust is inimical to democracy. We are, consequently, right to worry about widespread reports of trust's decline. Just as distrust is harmful to human relations of all kinds, and just as trust is central to positive human relations of all kinds, so is distrust inimical to democracy and trust central to its flourishing.     

公信力:文明政府的重要指标——兼谈政府如何赢得公信

近年来,许多案例表明政府公信力在下降。本文依据学术界有关信任的一般理论,讨论了政府公信力的内涵、意义和来源,简要分析了政府公信力流失的原因,指出重构政府公信力需要一场持久的诚实施政运动和政府再造工程。     

Expressions of Distrust: Third-Party Voting and Cynicism in Government

Voter distrust of the national government is an ongoing theoretical concern for scholars who study voting behavior in the United States. Previous research demonstrates that distrustful voters are less likely to vote for major party candidates than their more trusting counterparts. Using the American National Election Survey, we explore the relationship between citizen distrust and voting for three major third-party challengers (Wallace, Anderson, and Perot) and the use of trust levels as predictors of third- party voting. We find citizen trust levels are significant and strong predictors of third-party voting, independent of other common explanatory variables of vote choice. We also find trust levels are stable over time, and we find little evidence to support the argument that trust levels measure trust of incumbent political figures.     

Why the Devil Couldn't Beat Daniel Webster: Absolutes,Contradictions, and the Transference of American Legal Institutions

In this article I present a critique of efforts to extend the “rule of law model” to developing countries by the transfer of American legal institutions. I examine a popular American literary text, Steven Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster, to reveal a basic contradiction between constitutionalism and democracy in American legal culture. I analyze the rule of law model as a discourse, relating the transfer of these contradictory values to unintended results of legal reform recently reported in Costa Rica. Finally, I present conclusions about how transferring the values of American legal culture through legal reforms is related to judicialization in developing countries.     

Conspiracy Endorsement as Motivated Reasoning: The Moderating Roles of Political Knowledge and Trust

Given the potential political and social significance of conspiracy beliefs, a substantial and growing body of work examines the individual‐level correlates of belief in conspiracy theories and general conspiratorial predispositions. However, although we know much about the psychological antecedents of conspiracy endorsement, we know less about the individual‐level political causes of these prevalent and consequential beliefs. Our work draws from the extant literature to posit that endorsement of conspiracy theories is a motivated process that serves both ideological and psychological needs. In doing so, we develop a theory that identifies a particular type of person—one who is both highly knowledgeable about politics and lacking in trust—who is most susceptible to ideologically motivated conspiracy endorsement. Further, we demonstrate that the moderators of belief in conspiracy theories are strikingly different for conservatives and liberals.     

Why Overcoming Prejudice is Not Enough: A Rejoinder to Richard Rorty

Abstract

Misrecognition, taken seriously as unjust social subordination, cannot be remedied by eliminating prejudice alone. In this rejoinder to Richard Rorty, it is argued that a politics of recognition and a politics of redistribution can and should be combined. However, an identity politics that displaces redistribution and reifies group differences is deeply flawed. Here, instead, an alternative ‘status’ model of recognition politics is offered that encourages struggles to overcome status subordination and fosters parity of participation. Integrating this politics of recognition with redistribution enables a coherent Left vision that could redress injustices of culture and of political economy simultaneously.     

Agency, Structure, and Social Chance as Cross-Disciplinary Concepts

It is appropriate that social scientists should develop explicit conceptualisations of agency, structure and social chance, these being three major dimensions of social and political life. The agency–structure debate, which refers to theoretical and ontological issues that tend not to be explicitly discussed by political scientists, is an important interdisciplinary starting point for conceptual and empirical work involving collaboration between political scientists and sociologists. Following a theoretical review of agency, structure and chance, it is argued that empirical research concerned with the study of politics and policy – indeed, social scientific research on any topic – should employ an ontology and methodology that focuses on the dynamics of interaction between agency, structure and social chance.     

Policy Preferences and Political Distrust: A Comparison of Norway, Sweden and the United States

Many modern democracies have experienced a decrease in citizen support for government in recent decades. This article examines attitudes toward public policy as a plausible theoretical explanation for this phenomenon. The connection between public policy and support for the political regime has received considerable academic attention in the United States. Yet very little comparative work has examined whether citizens' policy preferences are related to a decline in diffuse support across different political systems. This article offers a clearer, more concise theoretical specification of the hypothesized relationship between public evaluations of policy outputs and support for the political regime. After specifying the theoretical concerns more succinctly, the article analyzes data from Norway, Sweden and the United States for the quarter century from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The analysis reveals that shifts in evaluations of foreign policy and race-related policies help explain change in political trust for all three countries despite differences in the political systems. Moral issues, such as abortion, however, have no impact on political trust in any of the countries.     

Health insurance in a democracy: Why is it public and why are premiums income related?

Many democracies have public health insurance systems which combine redistribution from the rich to the poor and from the healthy to the sick. This paper shows that such systems can be in the interest of the poor and the rich from a constitutional perspective. Necessary conditions are that insurance markets are incomplete and that income inequality is neither too low nor too high. Then even the rich can prefer a public health insurance system financed by income-dependent contributions compared to a system financed by a flat fee or a private health insurance system.     

Why the democratic nation-state is still legitimate: A study of media discourses

Focusing on media discourses, this article maps the communicative reproduction of legitimacy in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Switzerland. It argues that political communication constitutes a distinctive dimension of legitimation that should be studied alongside public opinion and political behaviour. Research on legitimation discourses can help us understand why the legitimacy of established democracies remains stable in spite of the challenges of globalisation: Delegitimating communication tends to focus on relatively marginal political institutions, while the core regime principles of the democratic nation-state, which are deeply entrenched in the political cultures of Western countries, serve as anchors of legitimacy. These democratic principles also shape the normative benchmarks used to evaluate legitimacy, thus preventing a 'de-democratisation' of legitimation discourses. Finally, the short-lived nature of media interest as well as ritualistic legitimation practices shield the democratic nation-state from many potentially serious threats to its legitimacy.     

Roadgrading Community Culture: Why the Internet is so Dangerous to Real Democracy

This article forwards an anarchist analysis of the internet as inherently degrading of local community and the possibility of real democracy emerging. The authors suggest that rampant virtuality, based on the eradication of time and space as functional communicative restraints, acts to separate individuals from their face-to-face relationships and localities. They forward that local community is the only forum in which genuine democracy and an ecological society can hope to thrive. The article argues that in asking the question Where do you want to go today?, the internet attempts to create a virtual everywhere, a universalising logic that is to communication what the WTO and globalisation are to economics. Further, the piece forwards a view of technology and society in dialectic relationship with one another, suggesting that democratic tools and a democratic society rely on one another for their emergence.     

Public Trust as a Driver of State-Grassroots NGO Collaboration in China

While the moniker non-governmental organization (NGO) connotes distance from the state, it is widely recognized that civil society in a range of political contexts is in fact characterized by close ties across the public-private divide. Scholars of Chinese social organizations have noted that proximity between the state and NGOs is even more pronounced in the context of China. What is less clear is why this is so. Why do grassroots NGOs overwhelmingly pursue engagement with the state? This paper presents findings that enumerate a number of motivating forces that drive state-NGO collaboration, particularly with respect to small, grassroots NGOs that do not have preexisting ties to elites or to the state. Most notable among these is that NGOs seek engagement with state agencies primarily in order to secure public trust. Public trust is found to be key to the ability of such groups to run programs, mobilize citizens or raise funds. These findings therefore have implications for how we understand the critical role of public support and legitimation—in addition to state control—in the enabling of civil society under authoritarianism.

     

不信任文化中的非人格化管理——匿名评审、年龄界限与一刀切现象的综合分析

匿名评审、年龄界限和一刀切三种现象看似毫不相关,但是其内涵却存在着一种共性,即凭借一种貌似客观的技术、数字和理性规则来实行管理,希望以此来克服管理过程中个人主观因素和其他不确定因素的影响.这种管理模式可以称之为非人格化管理,它产生于不信任文化的背景之上,相信技术而不相信个人的能动判断.这种管理模式落后于民主化和人性化的社会进程,必须用一种信任管理模式来替代它,重构和谐、创造、能动的管理关系.信任管理以人为中心,强调负责任的个人对公共政策的主动执行;信任管理是充分授权的管理,并不是完全依赖技术的控制力来实现集权化从上到下的管制;信任管理也是开放的管理机制,吸收环境中的支持力和压力要素,与环境展开积极的互动.信任管理是和谐社会的管理机制.     

Enabling Middle Managers as Change Agents: Why Organisational Support Needs to Change

Change efforts frequently fail to achieve their desired outcome with failure often attributed to employee resistance to change. Literature on resistance indicates it can emerge from ineffective change management. This article argues that change management could be improved through middle managers actively undertaking a change intermediary role, thereby enabling employees to make sense of, and reframe, the change. Qualitative data is used to explore the extent to which middle managers had the capacity and support necessary to effectively implement change. The article concludes by proposing that managers who are actively engaged change agents, who frame and make sense of the change with employees, can reduce resistance. However, for this to be realised, organisations need to actively support the systematic development of middle management change management capabilities.     

社会主义公有制经济中存在失业的原因分析

社会主义公有制经济中失业的可能性产生于公有制经济本身。社会主义生产是在技术进步、有机构成提高基础上进行的扩大再生产,这是公有制经济内部存在失业的技术经济条件;现阶段公有制经济的特点则是公有制经济内部存在失业的社会经济原因。     

Trust in elites and protest orientation: An integrative approach

The consensus based hypothesis that trust in political authorities is a major determinant of system stability has received less empirical support in the protest literature than its theoretical appeal once promised. We propose a major revision of the leadership-trust approach—one which integrates the conflict and consensus approaches by considering both public trust in established elites and public trust in challenging elites. Recognizing the importance of opposition leadership, we reason that thedifference between these two types of trust, which we conceptualize astrust differential, should explain protest orientation better than other trust-variable alternatives. The new trust differential variable suggests a distinctive typology of trust orientations which predict the degree of protest endorsement somewhat differently than the traditional authority-trust model. Using survey data collected in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1973, we test the integrative differential approach against and controlling for its classic competitors and find it to be a more powerful, independent predictor of protest orientation.This paper draws on findings and insights from papers that we presented at the American Sociological Association meeting, San Francisco, September 1978, and at the annual Western Social Science Association meeting, Denver, April 1978.